


do not hesitate to leap

by simplyprologue



Series: no sense in hiding from the front lines [1]
Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: AKA I Can Get Wordy, Angst, Capture the Flag But More Like Capture the Hewlett, F/M, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Last Days of War, Post Episode: s03e08 Mended, Romance, Written By A Historian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 18:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7233052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Days after receiving word of victory at Yorktown, Ben captures the British Fort Slongo — and Major Edmund Hewlett — on Long Island Sound. It's been over a year since Hewlett and Anna last met, and the circumstances more bloody than optimal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	do not hesitate to leap

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** So I've put off watching TURN for a few years now — I graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2015 with a degree in History and Government and a certification in Early American History/Museum Studies, and _lived_ in Colonial Williamsburg and _worked_ for Colonial Williamsburg so TURN was very much something on my radar, especially considering they filmed the throne room scene with King George III in season 2 while one of my classes was in session in the basement classroom underneath it. But I am a contrary asshole, so I didn't cave and watch it until I got really homesick for my alma mater... five days ago. Enter, a new OTP. 
> 
> Whoops. 
> 
> Better late than never?

_“We stand upon the precipice of change. The world fears the inevitable plummet into the abyss. Watch for that moment... and when it comes, do not hesitate to leap. It is only when you fall that you learn whether you can fly.”_

 

* * *

 

If the morning air chills her, she does not betray feeling any cold. The horse comes to a stop, and she dismounts, chest heaving as she breathes in gulp after gulp of smoke from the musket fire. The taste is acrid, cloying and heavy in her lungs — or it might be the sheer panic thrumming through her body.

Ben promised.

_He promised he wouldn’t get hurt._

“Edmund!” she screams, fisting her hands in her coat. Ben’s coat. She had been asleep in Ben’s tent, slumped over the table as the wick burned low in the tallow in its dish. She had put on Ben’s coat. It hangs to her knees, conspiring to trip her as she staggers through the ruins of the British fort. American fort; they’ve raised the rebel brand over the crumbling block house. _“MAJOR HEWLETT! EDMUND!”_

“Annie, Annie—”

Caleb’s hands close on her shoulders.

No one pays them any mind. Continental men are collecting boxes of ammunition to shuttle back to camp, counting stands of arms, wheeling an iron two-pounder and brass three-pounder away from the walls to be transported by cart. Groaning men in redcoats sit in the chilled mud, chained together in a line. Anna counts twenty-one prisoners, of a hundred-man garrison.

She had encouraged Ben to make this attack. She knew Edmund was here, and encouraged him to take Fort Slongo. _For the cause. For the cause. For the cause._ Word came yesterday of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. _For the cause. For the cause._ The war is all but won, they must continue these offenses on Long Island, must liberate New York as the seat of British military rule. _For the cause. For the cause. For the cause._ They will never be free until they’ve sent them scattering into the west, chased them up and out of American territory. Scorch the viper’s nest.

When John Andre had been hanged as a spy, Edmund Hewlett found himself not discharged and cashiered, but promoted. A movement of which Anna Strong had heard almost immediately from her sources in York City, but still she had no cause to see the man whose heart she had broken. Instead she busied herself as a woman in Washington’s camps, working as a spy in places where her face was not known, under different names. And on occasion, behind the front lines in battle, supplying the men with water for cannon and saltpeter for their guns.

On occasion, picking up a gun herself. Manning the cannon. Tying tourniquets and staunching wounds while waiting for the ambulance crew. Suturing wounds using the stitches she once made to sew her clothing.

“EDMUND,” she bellows, as Caleb leads her through the fort.

_For the cause._

Ben, hat in his hand, stands in front of a canvas tent. She could ring him, if she could loose her fingers from the jacket. But he looks such a sorry sight, head bowed. “Anna,” he says, unsure of how to continue. He opens the flap to the tent with a hand smeared with mud, coated in soot from musket fire.

There is a man on a single camp bed.

She knows his face. It is pale, and contorted with pain.

_For the cause. For the cause. For the—_

 

 

 

“Do ye think he’s aware of his surroundings?” Caleb asks, squinting down at Edmund’s prone form.

Anna realizes her mouth is agape, but she has nothing to say. They’ve found him delirious, with a tourniquet around his leg at the thigh and a musket ball lodged into a part of his leg she assumed she’d see on their dashed wedding night. Pursing her lips, she turns back to Edmund on the camp bed, forcing her fingers to acquit themselves of their tremble before lifting the bloodied gauze over his wound.

Edmund’s eyes slit open, focusing on nowhere in particular in the ill-lit tent. “Hell is open and all the devils are here,” he slurs, gaze falling from the ceiling to Anna’s white visage.

She swallows, looking back to Caleb with a lofted eyebrow. “I think he knows I’m about."

Gooseflesh prickles her skin. She is bare, in naught but her shift and a Continental officer’s jacket and her slippers. But in the early grey mists of dawn, when Caleb rode up to her tent shouting that she must come at once to save Major Hewlett’s life — _we don’t know when a surgeon’s comin’ Annie, annit’s bad, you can do it I’ve seen you do it before_ — she barely thought to put on her shoes, let alone a proper gown.

Caleb snorts, leaning on his rifle as he shifts between his feet.

“Clever _as_ the devil, an’ twice as pretty,” he says. “An’ this poor bastard’s gonna need _clever_ if ‘e intends to survive the day.”

Anna sighs, brushing a lock of closely-shorn brown hair off Edmund’s forehead, dotted with sweat. She gathers her nerves, steeling herself for what must be done. Turning to Caleb, she pushes her shoulders back. “I’ll need opium, boiling water, and forceps. Then fetch me the cleanest sword in camp—”

_“Are you cuttin’ off his leg?”_

“—and put it in the fire. Without a surgeon in camp, there won’t be a cautery. And this close to a blood vessel, the wound will have to be closed as soon as I get the musket ball out.”

She wonders what names Edmund will have for her _then._

“Oh.” Caleb leaves without further word, considering slinging his rifle over his shoulder for half a moment before turning back, and leaving it at her feet. “In case anyone tries something with you over lover boy.”

Anna suspects that _someone_ is _Abraham._ But she says nothing. She hasn’t any idea where Abe is, anyway. She hasn’t for months. Hasn’t cared to. Biting her lip, she looks at Caleb, nodding her thanks. It takes more mental exertion than she would care to admit to look back to Edmund. Except for the night of his return from capture in the Continental camp, she has never seen him less than perfectly coiffed and pressed. His mouth forms silent words, his eyes are held barely open, revealing nothing but the whites of his gaze. Oh, how he must hate her now.

“Major Hewlett?” she asks carefully.

No response.

“Major Hewlett, the surgeon is occupied with another man. If you are going to live and retain use of your leg I — I need to perform a — I need to remove the musket ball now,” she explains, proud of how her voice does not waver. “Can you understand me, Major?”

He mutters something, his head turning on the pillow.

Eyes widening, she places her hand over his forehead, easing his head so that he faces her again.

“Edmund?” she asks, more gently. The voice she thinks she might have used, had she become Mrs. Hewlett. The voice of a respectable gentlewoman, a loyalist wife of a British officer, the woman she was willing to be in order to save his life. In the year that’s passed she has become a hardened rebel operative, a woman with shrewd instinct and a wellspring of indifference to anything except for the cause. She kneels beside the bed. “Edmund, can you hear me, Edmund?”

He grimaces.

“Good Lord,” she whispers, framing his face with her palms. “Edmund?”

“What,” he rasps in a stilted voice imbued with venom. “Are — you doing here, Madam?”

“There was a battle, do you remember?” she asks in the same hushed tone, uncompromised by his embittered voice. “You were wounded in the leg, Major Tallmadge reported that you were wounded while trying to secure the northern wall, you were close to—”

“I remember,” he says flatly. “Madam, remove your hands from me.”

As if scalded, her hands jerk away from him. Lingering in the air for a moment, they eventually land in her lap. “Major Hewlett. You were wounded. Your options — your options are that you may wait for the surgeon to finish an operation on one of our sergeants, which may take — take hours, or you may allow me to save your leg.”

“Which was injured moments before I surrendered the fort, yes.”

“To your credit, Cornwallis surrendered eight thousand men to General Washington not a week ago.”

He grimaces again. “And how is that supposed to be a comfort to me, Mrs. Strong?”

“Are we so removed from the closeness we once shared that you will not call me Anna?”

“Yes.”

Sighing, her chin dips to her chest. Summoning her resolve, she takes one of his hands into the firm grasp of her own. “Will you at least let me save your leg? So that you might not spend the rest of your life a cripple. Suppose that I owe that to you, after all that I have done.”

The flap to the tent rustles behind her; Caleb has returned.

“From what I understand, he’s already half a gimp,” he mutters, dropping down into a squat next to her. Hewlett grouses something unintelligible in response, but Anna is distracted by the vials Caleb is setting down next to her. He procures a leather bundle from his jacket, untying it and laying it out onto the ground. It bears an assortment of medical tools and instruments more suitable for butchery than for an operation. “From the surgeon. He got a spare. Then a slight amount of laudanum,” he holds up a corked vial of clear liquid, then one of a dingier brown, “an’ chloroform. For ‘is comfort. As for the — other thing, it’s outside in the fire for when you need it.”

“And Ben?” she asks pointedly. “We had an agreement.”

“Overseeing the contraband, but I’ll go remind ‘im of that.”

“Thank you,” she answers curtly.

Her fingers drift over the blades and saws. Fine tools, clean tools. A bottle of whisky is among the supplies that Caleb brought her, and she is sorely tempted to bite the stopper and swing down a gulp of it herself.

“When did you become a medic?” Edmund asks, turning green at the suggestive sight of the bone saw.

She smiles wanly. “War makes perverse things of us all.”

“Ah.”

Her answer seems to satisfy him, for the time being. The Edmund Hewlett she knew was endlessly inquisitive, desperate to understand how things and people worked. This Edmund Hewlett is understandably weary, and lets his eyes drift closed. With a tender touch, her fingers land on his thigh, opening the tear in his breeches to reveal the wound.

The jagged tear in his skin is perhaps the length of her little finger, but she cannot see where the bullet is embedded in the roping muscle of his leg, or if he is truly unfortunate, in the bone. The depth of it troubles her, as does the steady stream of bright fresh blood seeping from his injury. It is bleeding much, and she cannot imagine how much it troubles him. But this is a man who cut off his own frostbitten toes with naught but a simple knife; Anna suspects he would endure much pain before revealing it in his figure or face.

“So will you?” she asks. “Will you let me tend to your injury?”

“Are you doing it to ease your conscience?”

She blanches.

“No. I wouldn’t, you — you know me better than that, Major.”

His eyes, hazy and delirium-glazed, open again. “Do I, Mrs. Strong? Do I truly know you at all?”

“Do you not know me well enough to know that I would loathe to see you die?” she asks, hardening her voice from the ill-formed specter of the Mrs. Hewlett that was never to be into the living, breathing, _determined_ Signal of Setauket.

He seems to accept that as a response.

“Do what you wish,” he says on a weak exhale. “You seem to do it anyway.”

 

 

 

There is an unanticipated amount of yelling. Largely from Caleb, who has never been present for such a bloody event before, other than the occasional murder, and never stayed to witness the struggling aftermath of a gunshot wound. Edmund, it seems, is too weak to participate much in the yelling, beyond an initial bellow of pain when Anna inserts the bracer into his thigh to visualize the injury field.

The medicine can only do so much to relieve the pain. Mostly, it relieves him of awareness.

She rids herself of Ben’s jacket quickly, as it impedes her mobility. Largely unaware that she is only in a thin shift, she continues with the procedure. Hands slick with whisky — it was Caleb, in the end, who took a swig of it before they continued — she uses her fingers and the forceps to locate the musket ball in Edmund’s thigh. It is not in bone as she feared, but when she removes it Edmund’s eyes roll back into his skull and half a second later, a surge of blood empties from his leg onto her.

One knee braced on the camp bed and her other foot on the ground, she gasps.

“Shite.”

It continues, coating her front with sticky redness, despite the tourniquet.

A sort of chaos begins, one she is accustomed to from battle and camp life. “The blade,” she urges Caleb. “Get the blade from the fire.” She staunches the wound with gauze but it will not stop the bleeding, only stay it. Edmund regains a sliver of consciousness, his sight focused on her face. _My God,_ she thinks. He is nearly grey, his lips almost blue. _Dear God in heaven, please._ “Please,” she whispers. The blood is dark and sticky between her fingers. “Please, Major, just a moment longer, you needn’t be strong for but a moment longer.”

“Anna,” he murmurs, the syllables tripping off a leaden tongue.

His head rolls to the side.

“Please, Edmund. Please, just live. I know, I know I’ve broken your heart and I’ve broken — I ruined everything, but please just live. If it’s the only thing I ask of you, it’s please, live,” she pleads. There is so much blood, she is up to her elbows in blood. The ghosts of battles past echo in her mind, the bodies of men both Continental and Redcoat strewn about like dolls forgotten in the grass by a distracted child, the blood of lesser men, the blood of men not as fine as her Edmund Hewlett — it all comes rushing back to her, and she struggles to breathe under the weight of it all.

_Click, boom._

Her mouth tastes like smoke from musket fire.

_For the cause._

Damn the cause, just let him live.

“Edmund, please,” she begs. Where is Caleb? Where is Caleb with the blade? Maybe only seconds have passed, not the gaping chasm of minutes stretching outwards as she perceives. “Please, I love you. I know you must hate me, for all that I am and all that I’ve done, but I love you. Please. I love you. I lied, I have always loved you. I love you, I love you, I love you.”

There is too much blood. She has seen men die as she’s worn this much of their blood. But then Caleb is there, with Ben, and a hot blade is being handed to her. The steel is gleaming orange, and with a movement that betrays her practice at this maneuver — just as Ben and Caleb are as practiced with their guns and bayonets — she presses the steel to the inside of the wound. Blood hisses and skin crackles, and Edmund jerks to awareness, screaming.

“A bit longer,” she grits out.

His body fights the intrusive pain. It is excruciating, she cannot imagine being scorched from the inside out. In the end, she yells at Ben and Caleb, “Hold him down, would you?” Curses race from Major Hewlett’s mouth that she’s never heard before, but she considers him a more well-travelled citizen of the world than she. “It’s all right,” she says, looking not at his face but his wound, and despite the fact that clearly _none_ of this is all right. A little lie. She trades in lies. All of them, except Edmund. “Just a bit longer.”

She leans up onto the bed, unaware of her own indecency.

“Givin’ him quite a view there, Annie.”

Caleb seems more amused than anything.

Were she not _preoccupied_ she would care that the low ruffled neck of her shift must be giving Major Hewlett an uninterrupted glimpse of her breasts. Hell, he can more than likely see clear to her nether regions, _if his eyes weren’t looking into the back of his head._ Ben cackles, bracing the Major’s shoulders against the mattress. As if there weren’t pages upon pages of proof of their indecencies, even if they were writ in invisible ink. But she, she thinks for a second or two as her mind grapples with the absurdity of it all. She _is_ the spy who fell in love with her mark.

“Is this how you got him to propose, Anna?” Ben goads her, as if she isn’t holding a hot knife. “Gave him a good look at the prospects of the marriage bed?”

The flesh of his thigh is beginning to sear closed, turning torn flesh into raised pink scar tissue. The scent of burning flesh is deeply unpleasant, but necessary.

“Major Hewlett is a good and honest man, unlike you lot,” she says. Slowly, the tide of blood is beginning to ebb. Sniffling, she ignores the beads of sweat dripping down from her hairline into her eyes. Just a bit longer, and then she can tie off the wound. “Despite his deeply unfortunate political affiliations and love of the crown.”

“Only unfortunate?” Caleb teases.

“I could think of a few more words for it,” Ben says.  

Caleb snorts. Then, a moment later, contributes another sterling observation. “And you’ve got the man out of his britches.”

That may or may not be true, considering that she had to cut his breeches off of him, and the Major was not a willing participant. Still, his breeches do litter the floor — just as the Major’s blood covers her from chin to navel. “And considering I’ve only seen him out of his uniform jacket before,” she murmurs, playing along with the bawdy soldier's humor for a moment.

Ben pretends to be aghast. “The horror. Was his face powdered, at least?”

“In truth I do not know. I believe not, for I could see a bruise on his eye.”

He’d come to rescue her from Simcoe then, if her account of events is correctly remembered. Come to rescue her hardly recovered from his trials, desperate to remove her from the threat of Simcoe’s lingering presence.

She chances a glance at his face.

Although not conscious of his current trials, his face is twisted in a look of pain. Hand trembling, from exertion or emotion she does not know, she removes the knife from his leg. Blood trickles out, but only a little. He relaxes.

But now she must clean the wound again.

Pursing her lips into a firm line, she reaches for the whisky again, pouring out a goodly amount onto a clean rag. Then, holding the rag in her hand, douses the wound with its own _goodly amount_ of whisky. Edmund cries out in pain, and she leans over him, consoling him with one gentle palm on his cheek as her other hand is firm in cleaning out any possible detritus from the wound before she bandages it.

“Edmund, it’s almost over,” she tries to soothe him. “It is almost done. Just a moment longer. Please, love.”

Breathing in uneven gasps, his eyes fly open.

After a moment, he seems to understand that she is there, his gaze raking desperately over her form. Were it longer than a moment, she might have blushed. For all that Ben and Caleb teased her appearance in her nearly-sheer shift, it is true that she would be giving any man that walked into the tent a view of an indecent amount of skin.

“Dear Lord, I want to _live,”_ Edmund pants out, before falling out of consciousness again.

Anna does her level best to ignore Caleb’s guffaws.

“See, there’s a man under all that starched red wool.”

“He is _out of his head,_ you sod,” she grumbles, carefully unknotting the tourniquet. “A good, decent man… a good, _honorable_ man…” Their words fade into the same unacknowledged world of anything beyond the tent. This is the moment of truth — if she stopped the bleeding, this will prove it. “Please,” she murmurs.

Just a slow trickle.

A slow trickle of blood, from the sea of red of just minutes ago.

Breath knocked from her, she slides from her perch on the camp bed to the ground, legs folding under her body. Forgetting the blood on her hands, she wipes her brow of sweat and errant hairs. Just barely, she is aware that the sun has risen outside, that reams of sunlight are dripping on them and the men of Ben’s garrison are speaking in loud, excited tones.

Then she reaches for him, sliding a hand under his shirt to place her hand over his heart. His pulse is slight, but fast. There is the red stamp of her hand on his chest when she pulls it away.

Anna weeps.

 

 

 

The war is lost, has been for months, truly. They’ve been losing more soldiers to disease and hunger more than battle, men fleeing in the middle of the night to somewhere warm and with the promise of something more than hardtack and small ale or merely succumbing to the bloody flux or consumption before the need for battle arises. The Americans — he cannot believe he’s using that word now — have outlasted them. Have adapted to the environment. Have been adaptable, end of line.

_Law. Order. Authority._

He bought his commission to support his family’s gentry lifestyle, his financial decision emboldened by a deep-seated instinctual drive for an ordered life of codified social norms and rules of engagement. He carried no passions with him to American soil but for his own yearnings to be a child of the Enlightenment. The British Empire was the law of nearly two-thirds of the world, it was _his_ world. And he had never questioned that.

He still does not, mostly. He is a Scotsman who has profited from the Empire’s rule and control of the sea. Law and order and British authority has kept his family in their ancestral dwelling and well-educated and refined. He had not so much as shot a gun before the war, if not for sport or hobby.

It was not until years into the war that he questioned how King George intended to rule over millions that wanted him dead.

_Law. Order. Authority._

Major Edmund Hewlett is a man of genteel breeding and noble stock, a man who does not question social order or the throne as it applied to his status as a British subject. Major Edmund Hewlett is in love with a rebel spy, a patriot woman who is chaos personified in a goddess hungry for the freedom of a mob, self-liberated by her love of cause and country. If she had not betrayed him so explicitly… Anna Strong’s passions would be exhilarating.

He does not want to live as an American, but he loves her for being one, he thinks.

Above him, the canvas tent moves with the wind. In a vague sense, he is aware of the blankets tucked around him, and the soft hand on his forehead.

_I love you, I love you, I love you._

He is not an American, but he cannot imagine leaving New York behind him.

_I love you._

He sleeps.

 

 

 

When he stirs, his mouth is dry and tastes bitter and metallic, the first indications that he has been apart from the waking world for quite some time. His first attempt to take a deep breath results in a cough. Warm hands brace his back, helping him sit.

His left thigh is on fire.

“Up, that’s it. Drink some water, Major.”

His eyes blink open. The tent is gone; he is in a well-furnished bedroom. Hewlett wonders how horrific a state he must have been in to not awaken when he was moved. “Where are we?”

Anna places the cup down onto the nightstand, looking around to the blue and yellow wallpaper, the velvet drapes on the canopied bed, the rugs on the floor, the fire at the end of the room. Anywhere, but him. “The Phillipses, a local family,” he is aware of them, but he does not tell her that, “offered Major Tallmadge use of their home as headquarters and to—”

Her voice stops, and she looks down to the porcelain pitcher in her hand.

“Keep me under house arrest, I might suppose.”

“Ah, yes.”

There is very little color on her cheeks, and he surmises she has not slept. There is a chair in the corner near the fire, with a pillow and a blanket strewn on it. Hewlett is unsure as to how he feels about the conclusions he could draw from this information — he knows that while Anna’s visit to him in York City as he awaited a discharge after their wedding-that-wasn’t was, in part, to meet with a source within the ring to divulge the identity of Benedict Arnold as a turncoat. But he also knows now, that she lied to him during her visit to York City.

He does not know what to think.

It is an odd feeling.

“Ben — Major Tallmadge, that is, has written to General Washington. If you are paroled it might be — you might be paroled into my household.” She places the pitcher carefully next to the cup, with more care than necessary. “But I could find other arrangements.”

“Where have you been living?” he asks.

Anna swallows hard, brushing her hands down the front of her skirts. “When I’m not needed elsewhere, I’ve been following the Continental Army from camp to camp. But I take a salary and am reimbursed for my expenses, so I’ve enough — a respectable amount, saved up, enough to start my life over at another tavern if I so wished.”

“In Setauket?”

“York City, perhaps,” she says, a distant smile on her face. “Once we break it free of you red pests. I’ve contacts in York City. And it might be nice, to begin where there’s no one to gossip about me. To live as I wish, befriend who I wish.”

“Marry who you wish?” he rasps.

Her smile falls. “I suppose. But there hasn’t — there has not been — I am a woman alone, is what I intend to say. If that was your question.”

“It wasn’t,” he says, but has no intention of clarifying what he meant. He does not know himself. He is weak and abed and he hopes that it makes a difference to Anna. But it feels _good_ to know that there hasn’t been anyone else. That her words when she thought he was dying might be true. “Forget it, I’ve forgotten myself.”

“Understandable. You’ve lost quite a bit of blood.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“A day, a night, then another day.” Her gaze shifts to the window. “It’s nearly sundown again.”

Hewlett winces as he tries to sit up further on the pillows. The whole of his body is throbbing and sore, but his left leg is splinted under the covers — the center of pain. Groaning, he falls back, aware that he must be quite a sight. No peruke, out of uniform, surely a day of stubble on his face. Anna has never seen him so disheveled. He had been _certain_ that Anna would never see him so disheveled.

“Do not — Major, let me help you.”

With a strength he didn’t know she had, she aids him in finding a more comfortable position against the headboard.

“Are you very tired?” she asks, hands twisting in her apron. Withdrawn in demeanor, she seats herself on the edge of the mattress. “Are you hungry?”

He almost smiles.

“I am very tired. I am not hungry.”

“Do you wish for me to leave you to sleep? I could build up the fire again before I go.”

With a sigh, he concedes this much to himself: he does not want Anna to leave his side. Weaker than he’d like to admit to feeling, he reaches out to take her hand. “I do not want you to leave, Mrs. Strong.”

Mouth shaping into an O, she looks down at their joined hands.

“Well.”

“I have but two questions for you.”

“Yes,” she says earnestly. “Anything.”

For a moment, he is not certain as to how he should order them. The first is from an intelligence report he read half a year past, the second is from his half-remembered impressions of yesterday morning as he lay prone in the tent in Fort Slongo. One might answer the other, rendering it redundant, but perhaps it might be eliminated in the phrasing of his inquiries.

Hewlett decides that a chronological approach might be the best way of handling things.

“Were you the operative going by the codename _Andromeda_ in York City this past spring?”

This was clearly not the question she anticipated him asking. Her eyes — warm, dark, hooks into his soul — grow wider. Clasping his hand in both of hers, she shrugs. “By my duty to General Washington and the ring I am not able to — that is to say that I am not _allowed_ to compromise my position as one of his—”

“You told me you were a spy, Mrs. Strong,” he reminds her. “And here I am, your prisoner, in the last days of a war my side has lost. Were you Andromeda?”

Looking at him with an open gaze, she swallows hard, distending the lines of her delicate throat.

“I was. I am,” she stammers. “I _am_ Andromeda.”

“I have no intentions of asking what you were doing under that name, I assure you.”

“Good, because I could not tell you.”

“I _would not ask,_ ” he assures her. If nothing else, he has come to respect Anna’s patriot ideology for no other reason than the weight of her convictions behind it. Were she a man or an officer, society would dictate that he treat her albeit dissenting and treasonous opinions with the due weight of a gentlemen’s consideration. Anna is not a gentlewoman, but he suspects her position in General Washington’s army might be comparable to that of an officer.

And he has come to understand himself, that if she were not so passionate about every aspect of her being, he would love her less.

Despite the pain she’s brought him, he does not want her to be less than she is.

A damned capable spy, even if she has worked against everything that he holds as necessary and proper to live as a civilized man. Even if he very much still resents her for it.

“May I ask… what is your second question?”

Absently, her index finger traces circles into his palm and he finds it quite distracting.

“Yesterday morning as you were — I won’t parse it, as you were saving my life — you said that you love me.”

Shoulders tensing into a straight line, she closes her eyes.

“You remember that?”

“I do.” There are other things he remembers, which make him doubt the accuracy of his recollections. But it has confirmed that his memory has not failed him on one point, at the least. “And I — you must tell me, Anna. Were you lying a year ago, or were you lying yesterday? Or is the truth merely whatever suits your cause at any given moment?”

Flinching, she squeezes her eyes shut more tightly before opening them. A tear slides down her cheek, to her chin, and then onto her breasts. “At least,” she says, sniffling, “you’ve called me Anna again.”

He sighs.

“I would like to know the truth.”

She sighs, cocking her head as a slew of emotions grip and release her face — fear, reticence, stubbornness, and the ever-present current of passion. Sniffing again, she brings one of her hands to her eyes, wiping away tears. Her eyes avoid his face.

“I told you what I’ve needed to, to keep you safe,” she says, voice clogged with grief and what Hewlett thinks might be remorse. “I always have.”

“I want the truth from you, Anna,” he reminds her, perhaps not as gently as he might have.

She flinches again.

“When I asked to meet with you in York City, it was to send you running as far as I could,” she whispers. Her fingers tremble in his own. “I thought you would book travel to Scotland, run far away from this war and from Simcoe and Abe and all of it, but—”

“Andre was captured.”

Looking up at him for a moment, she nods. “Andre was captured. And by then — you would hate me forever, anyway. So what did it matter what you thought of me? What did it matter of my lies? I had ruined the one good thing in my life, as I’ve always had the habit of doing. Except you were a decent, honorable man of good heart and noble beliefs and I — was the spy who fell in love with her mark. What could come from us but further injury? What more but calamity, the noose around one or both of our necks? We would not be moved from our positions, so it was — love is not enough to save a life. It never has been.”

“These violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die like fire and powder, which as they kiss, consume,” he muses, looking up at the ceiling. The long reach of dusk stretches its dim yellow fingers over the dark wood.

“I do not know how I thought it would ever — I did intend to leave America with you.”

“I would not ask you of that, now. It is your home.”

“But it isn’t yours.”

“Anna,” he says, as if he was tasting the word. “You have sacrificed a truly remarkable amount for your country. You shall not be separated from it.”

“You do not believe it should even be its own country.”

“Ah,” he answers. “But that is no longer a matter of fact. As we both know, the war for American independence is in its death throes and the Empire has lost.”

“Well…”

Her hand goes limp in his, but he tightens his grasp. On her face is an expression of confusion, which he supposes is apt. “If I go back home across the sea, what will I do? Try to become a man of station and education again? After facing capture, torture, and brutal injury? Go home to a place, to people who have only seen me a naive child of the sciences? What awaits me in Scotland, now?” His explanation, he sees, has only confused her further. “I could never hate you, Anna,” he says softly. “I wouldn’t send myself thousands of miles from the woman I love, now that a war no longer divides us.”

“Major Hewlett?”

“Edmund, please.” He wraps his hand around hers, pulling it into the no-man’s-land between where she sits and where he lays. “We have choices now, Anna.” Or rather. He smiles. “Well, you have choices now. I, on the other hand, am a prisoner of war. Though a prisoner with a jailer who is beautiful beyond comparison.”

“I do not understand.”

“I accept things as they manifest in reality,” he says, beginning to feel weary, though not with Anna. “America shall be its own country. This war will soon come to a close. I can either grieve my efforts have been wasted, or marvel at the woman it has brought into my life and hope that she would be obliged to remain in it.”

Her tears swell into gulping sobs. “But I have — I have hurt you so badly, if we are to discuss facts.”

“I will mend.”

Some day. All wounds heal, even if they leave him limping. Anna is a balm for his soul. Perhaps by the time the British forces leave New York and as a lone British officer among a million Americans, he can live freely. With her, wherever she wishes to go. Weakly, he tugs her closer, until she is forced to brace her arm above his head on the pillows to keep from collapsing atop him.

“Edmund?” she asks quietly, staring down at him.

“I’m afraid I cannot come up to meet you — but I kissed you once, and would quite like to do it again if you’re so inclined.”

A smile flutters across her lips.

“I just might be.”

Her visage is battered — hair askew, eyes ringed with bruises of exhaustion, skin showing the blemishes of anxiety and a dearth of sleep — but Hewlett believes that there is no force on Earth that may diminish Anna Strong’s beauty. Careful of him, a thought which he finds both flattering and amusing, she lowers her mouth to meet his.

Maybe the pain will make for a sweeter epilogue.

 

 

 

She sleeps beside him that night, but only because a smirking Caleb carries her hunched form from the chair near the fire to the bed. He does not protest, merely raises his brow at the man who seems so entirely diverted by the situation he’s created.

“Lieutenant Brewster?”

“Annie doesn’t sleep, you see,” he says, pulling the pins from her hair as if he’s had some practice of late. “More like ‘er body admits defeat.”

He lifts his hand, mimicking the waving of a presumably white flag.

“Well,” Hewlett says, glancing his hand over the crown of Anna’s head, “it is not as if I’m going to be occupied doing anything else tonight.”

 

 

 

They are engaged, again. Or to be engaged, or re-engaged, whatever the terminology may be. As soon as it is proper for a patriot woman to marry a man of crown and king. Until then, they are obliged to some impropriety as long as he is bed-bound with his leg wound.

“I'm not likely to get a pension if I'm to wed a rebel spy,” he says, more thinking out loud about their marital finances than anything else. If he is not to live off the family stipend, then things must be planned for. He knows that Anna has her own accounts, but he is still a stiff British gentleman at heart, two generations removed from peerage. It would not be done to live off his wife’s money, even if she is no longer singing a song of sixpence, so to speak.

She catches his thumb where it rounds her cheekbone, charting the topography of her face. In time, he plans on knowing all of her by touch. “I think my pension will be enough for us to live off of, Edmund.”

"Pension?"

“For my years in the General's secret service. Unless you're too proud to be supported by your wife's covert patriot activities.”

“At times they were hardly covert, my dear,” he murmurs, turning his head to breathe a kiss to the palm of her hand.

“I would own and run my tavern,” she muses, wriggling closer to him. “And you could do whatever it is learned men of your rank and station do with your time. Discover new constellations and solve all the mysteries of the universe to teach to the children in their turn.”

“Children?”

He likes them, in concept. In practice, he has been around few. But he might enjoy a couple, if they were to have Anna’s endearing eyes.

“Only four or five, if the first three run us in circles,” she teases.

“So there would be far fewer clothes in our marriage bed than there are now?” he asks, delighting in the color that pinkens her cheeks. In honesty, he surprises himself with the quip, ready to brush it away as a consequence of too little blood left in his body and too much sleep, but Anna’s shoulders shake with riotous laughter.

Sitting up, she looks at him, still laughing. “You’ve already seen it all, anyway.”

“Wait. When?”

Snorting in a distinctly unladylike fashion, she shakes her head. “You can remember me telling you I love you, but not that I did so while in nothing but bedclothes that gaped so that you could see everything along the way from my head to my toes — I’m afraid I must inform you that Caleb and Major Tallmadge remember, and assume you to be quite the scoundrel.”

“From what little I know of Lieutenant Brewster, it might be a compliment coming from him.”

“Oh, it is.”

Still. “What… did I do? Or rather, what did I do that I am not remembering?”

“I’m afraid I should remain silent to spare your sense of your own honor,” she says, laying down again beside him. Her eyes shine with humor, and he endeavors to make her laugh more — she looks more alive than he’s seen her in years — despite his lack of education in the area of bawdy humor.

A grin quirks at his lips. “Now I must know.”

“It seems my breasts were enough to — well I believe your exact words were _Dear Lord, let me live_ — but I can assure you, you weren’t in a state to use your eyes to see anything in that dark tent,” she explains slowly, lips betraying her amusement at the incident.

He feels his own face flush with color, then flush even deeper when her eyes catch his betray him and drop his gaze to the rounded tops of her breasts peeking out over her bodice. “I would imagine that for Major Tallmadge and Lieutenant Brewster, however — they were not positioned as to see how conscious I may or may not have been?”

“That would be correct.”

Struggling to come up with a reply, he blushes harder.

“Why were you in only a shift, in a military installment full of men?”

“I had no time to dress,” she answers honestly, “when Caleb came for me with news that you had been grievously injured, despite Ben’s promise to me that you would be taken unharmed or allowed to escape. Though I do promise I was also wearing a jacket, I was not naked on the road or wandering through the fort. It was only very improper, not extremely improper.”

That was not the reply he expected. Though, he is not sure _what_ he expected.

“Oh. I love you.”

“Well,” Anna breathes, resting a hand on his chest. “Anything for the cause.”

This, of course, does nothing for the state of his face, and Hewlett finds himself blushing all the way down to his mangled toes until a knock at the door signals the arrival of his supper.

 

 

 

With that night arrives the first of her nightmares. Caleb was not incorrect in his estimation of her sleeping habits — with sleep, comes dreams. And so, she does not sleep. For these years past, all her dreams have been awash with blood and death and horror. The totality of her exhaustion following her initial efforts in nursing Edmund to a modicum of health seems to have absolved her the terrors of her sleeping mind for a few nights, but on the third she jerks awake, panicking as her feet kick uselessly at the blanket covering her.

Setauket woods. Mist and grey. Night and death.

Always the same, though the bodies run through a rotation. For years now, she has found Edmund unmoving atop the leaves and fallen branches, limbs twisted like a macabre marionette with its strings cut. His old enemies have always been out there. But now she has such vivid detail to construct her nightmares with.

It was Simcoe, holding the smoking gun.

 _EDMUND,_ she screamed, her voice dwindling to a desperate exhale. _EDMUND, EDMUND, EDMUND._

It turns out he is a light sleeper, or perhaps her movements have pained him, because he wakes not a minute after she does.

“Anna, my dear—”

She cannot catch her breath, clasping a hand over her throat and closing her eyes.

It passes, sometimes in seconds and sometimes in minutes, and on one horrid occasion it lasted over a full hour, but it always passes.

“Are you quite all right?”

She nods her head, then shakes it.

“Was it a nightmare?”

Her attempt to voice an answer becomes a plaintive cry, and she folds herself nearly in half into her legs. Her heart pounds in her chest, ringing against her breastbone. Gingerly, Edmund sits up, combing his fingers through her hair. “It wasn’t real, Anna. Whatever it was, it was not real. You are safe. It was not real. Sit up, I fear — I fear that sitting like that cannot help you breathe, my dear Anna.”

Gasping, she places her palms on her thighs, and straightens her back.

“Would it help if…” his voice mutes into silence, but his fingers pluck nervously at the laces of her bodice. Wiping her palms on the blanket, she lifts her hands to her face, burying her sight in the black of her palms. Then, still struggling for breath, she nods. Awkwardly, he pulls apart the laces, trying to touch only the thick fabric but not the thin-boned stays underneath. Then that is done, and he hesitates again. “Should I?”

Taking a measured, but shaky, breath she nods again.

He unlaces her corset.

Together, they manage to get them off her, and she throws the garments down onto the floor, left in her shift and her petticoats. Only then is she able to sink down onto the bed again, shaking as fear and apprehension grips her limbs in turn, one releasing her for the other to rouse up and take her instead.

“Does this happen often?” Edmund asks softly, lying down beside her.

They do not touch.

Pressing the heel of her hand to her forehead, she nods. “Yes,” she answers breathlessly. “I will not make much of a bedmate — in this sense of the word.” Her attempt at a joke does not relieve him, she can see, and he looks worriedly at her.

Shifting onto her side, she takes his hand.

“Do you require a doctor?”

“Says the man — who was shot — not three days past.”

“Anna,” he chides her.

Already, she feels her heart begin to slow. His thumb draws fearful circles around her knuckles, but he does not grant her touch elsewhere, perhaps out of fear of exacerbating her attack. So she pulls his hand up, and places it on her breast over her heart.

“I will be fine,” she murmurs. “Just wait.”

His touch comforts her, she thinks. Fingers fanning over her breast, he wraps his arm around her waist, pulling her closer to him with a shattering sense of tenderness. Warmth blooms in her feet, spreading up her calves and thighs and into her belly until it sunbursts in her chest. All sorts of things slow, and she finds herself quickly accustomed to his hands resting over her frame with only a thin layer of linen between them.

“I will stay awake,” he says, suddenly conscious of just where his hand is resting on her body, and tugs her to rest her head on his shoulder. “While you sleep. In case it happens again, I’ll wake you up at the first sign of distress.”

“Edmund, you don’t—”

“Anna.”

She complies. Her last thought is of if he likes the smell of her hair, as his nose burrows into it.

 

 

 

He falls asleep, of course, sometime after she does. When he is pulled from his slumber in the morning, Anna is redressed in a quilted blue petticoat and yellow Brunswick jacket, looking like a dash of summer sky against October grey. She decides he is strong enough to sit with her at the fire, bracing him against her as they make the short walk from the bed to the armchairs.

She serves him the tea the rebels have been boycotting for years, and despite claiming having lost the taste for it, drinks three cups with him.

One day, months or perhaps another year from now, this may be their life. In a home of their own, in a different city, in a different season. He wants Anna to have her tavern, even if he does not know what sort of life America has for him now. Perhaps he’s come to love it in his own way; one cannot spend years trying to defend something without coming to love it. He will come to love it the way Anna does, as a wild untamed animal that has broken free and taken her citizens with it. It was her wildness he loved first, as she plunged into the frigid river out of her husband’s boat.

They debate some manner of politics, he refuses to admit he is too tired to pay the whole due of attention, until she threatens to name their first child _Liberty._

After that he concedes, and holds her hand as she reads from a Shakespeare anthology she finds on the shelf.

 

 

 

“Edmund,” she sighs, closing the section on sonnets. He’s fallen asleep, after fighting it for an hour, begging that he would rather have her company than rest.

She takes a blanket from the bed, and shakes it out over him.

Stooping to brush a kiss against his temple, she murmurs, “Sleep well, my love,” and descends to join Ben and Caleb in the sitting room at the map of the remaining British outposts on Long Island.

They fall one by one.

 

 

 

They marry when the autumn shakes leaves of vibrant reds and oranges from the trees of York City in the fall of 1783, mere days after Great Britain recognizes the sovereignty of the United States of America. She holds a gun to Abe’s head not once, not twice, but three times during the years preceding the nuptials. It is a new changing world, with talks of a presidency and a republic and she _will not bend_ to old friends turned into new enemies and the world she fought so hard to shed like an ill-fitting skin.

Anna Strong becomes Anna Strong Hewlett in the tavern on the corner of Pearl and Broad Street she purchases in her last weeks as a widow after the British forces evacuate the island. The next thing she does is write Abby and Cicero, offering them a place at her hearth. As she is still becoming accustomed to the band of gold on her finger, General Washington resigns in her dining room.

He bids farewell to each of his officers, and takes her arm, leading her to her own office.

When they acquit themselves of the room some half an hour later, tears are streaming down Mrs. Hewlett’s face, and she firmly tells her husband that they are naming their first child after the General or she will be walking down to the courts for an annulment post haste.

She walks into a room full of Continentals who raise their glasses and cheer her, the Signal of Setauket.

 

 

 

Hewlett does not expect a tête-à-tête with the General. Which is all the more reason for an ambush, he supposes, finding himself in the middle of a calm assault focusing on Anna’s various sacrifices for the cause and myriad of virtues and making sure that he is aware and educated on all of these matters.

“You have no reservations in regards to a rebel woman marrying a former British officer?” he asks, in a moment where it does not seem impertinent. He cannot imagine a scenario in which one of his own former commanding officers would have cared so much about his marriage, let alone his commander in chief.

But Anna, in her six years of service, has ingratiated herself with the head of the American military.

Former. Former head of the American military.

Hewlett understands he should be experiencing fear, but mostly he is feeling proud of his wife. And a pain in his left leg from the old injury, as Washington deliberately outpaces him on their stroll down Broad Street.

“I’d have them,” Washington responds, folding his hands at his back, “if she hadn’t been reporting on you for many years before your nuptials. I imagine Anna will continue to report to me… on her marital felicity, or lack thereof.”

Nodding, he looks up at the much taller man. “Understood.”

 

 

 

Their first child is brought forth into the world the next winter, a girl of hardy composition and healthy lungs. Her mother is enervated from the trials of birth, the labor bed slick with blood and the viscera of bringing a child into the world. But bodies are washed and sheets are replaced with clean ones, her mother wrapped in a thick dressing gown and the babe in soft knitted blankets and the midwife and gossips and Abby herself pronounce them both to be quite healthy, although sore.

An entire tavern’s worth of men — politicians, soldiers, merchants, all her mother’s people, and scholars and students, her father’s — are waiting downstairs for the news.

But there is peace in the waiting, for the child’s cries are strong and carry clear through the morning, eventually sending her father bounding up the staircase as fast as his crippled foot and awkward leg will carry him. He crashes through the door to the master and mistress’ bedroom to see his wife aglow in the morning light laying back against the pillows, the babe — his _daughter_ , as if that wasn’t the most pleasantly absurd thing in the universe — at her breast.

“It’s a girl,” Anna whispers, voice hoarse. A tear drips down the slope of her nose. “We have a little girl.”

Upon first sight, Hewlett is certain that _she_ is the center of the known solar system, Copernicus be damned.

The child is given quite a solemn name for such a tiny girl—

_Polaris Georgiana._

But Polly, for short.

The morning air in mid-December is cold, nearly frigid in York City so close to water. But wrapped in blankets and her parents’ arms, she feels no such cold.

**Author's Note:**

> I was really tempted to do footnotes (my love for Chicago style) but I assumed that would be a little over the top. I'm glad to answer any questions, though! It was fun to be able to go back and reference texts and sources I hadn't had an excuse to read since I graduated. The quote in the beginning is from Dragon Age. It felt apt. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Comments are very much appreciated. 
> 
> Sequel? Maybe?


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